Bilderberg 2017: Trump tops agenda at annual secret meeting of global elite
[watch out for supremely annoying irrelevant auto play video from 2013]
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/bilderberg-2017-trump-tops-agenda-annual-secret-meeting-global-elite-1624276
The annual secret meeting of the world's elite will be discussing everything from Trump's presidency to fake news.
By Charlie Skelton in Chantilly, Virginia June 1, 2017 11:26 BST Bilderberg 2013: Charlie Skelton on the Annual Secret Conference
With all the supple silence of a python sliding round the gut of a sleeping monkey, Bilderberg 2017 is slipping unobtrusively into life.

Throughout today (1 June), limousine after limousine will come purring through the heavily guarded gates of the Westfields Marriott hotel, just outside Washington DC, gently depositing politicians, party leaders and public officials into happy laps of some of the world's most powerful financiers.

Bilderberg is an annual three-day political summit, held entirely in private, and hosted and paid for by big business.

It's currently led by a board member of HSBC, Henri de Castries, and is run by a steering committee which includes the heads of Google, Deutsche Bank, Santander and Airbus.

They're joined this year by the heads of AXA, Bayer, ING, Lazard, Fiat Chrysler and the IMF. And the King of Holland, who owns great chunks of Royal Dutch Shell. In short, Bilderberg is so high powered that if it were a car Richard Hammond would have killed himself in it.

This year sees a glut of US politicians heading out of the Beltway and into Bilderberg. Four close associates of the President have been invited, including his Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, and his National Security Advisor, HR McMaster. The conference is taking Trump seriously enough to stick him on top of their agenda, promising "a progress report" on his administration.

When the reckoning is made, it's unlikely Trump will get much support from committed globalists like Bilderberg insider Eric Schmidt, the head of Google, who in the past has castigated Trump for being "anti-globalisation".

The internationalists and europhiles of Bilderberg are no fans of Trump, although the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who sits with Schmidt on the group's steering committee, has never been shy of expressing his admiration for America's 45th president. "He's very charismatic", says Thiel, and has "a phenomenal understanding of people".

His fellow billionaire, Henry Kravis, agrees. The head of KKR said recently that Trump will "deliver on his promises". Although I'm not sure anyone even remembers what those promises were. Something about winning so much you throw up?

Team Trump will be joined at Bilderberg by two US Senators and the Governor of Virginia, and from slightly further afield, the Chinese Ambasador to the US, Cui Tiankai. With "China" cropping up on the conference agenda, this raises the awkward spectre of the Logan Act, which expressly forbids US citizens to negotiate with any foreign power "in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States."

If you allow "controversy" to include the South China Sea, then you've got all the ingredients for a violation. Not that the police are about to burst into the Marriott and start arresting people. Although if they did, I think Henry Kissinger (who is also attending) might be wanted for war crimes. It's worth bearing in mind.

There's a stronger than usual whiff of Goldman Sachs to this year's conference. By my count there are five tentacles of the vampire squid at the Westfields Marriott: James A. Johnson, a director; the former president of the EU Commission, José M. Durão Barroso, now chairman of Goldman Sachs International; former World Bank boss, Robert Zoellick, who chairs the bank's International Advisory Board; and two members of that board, Victor Halberstadt and José Luis Arnaut.

It's always worth remembering, when you're wondering whether it's such a good idea for so many politicians to be cosily closeted away for three days at Bilderberg, that the conference is part-funded and heavily populated by arguably the world's most loathed financial institution.

You don't have to scratch this year's invitation list very hard to find it problematic. The Spanish minister of economy cooped up with the head of Spain's largest bank. The Canadian finance minister and the head of Canada's largest bank. The CEO of Airbus, the world's 7th largest arms company, sandwiched between the head of Nato and the Dutch defence minister, discussing defence spending. Cosy.

But personally what I find most problematic is this item halfway down the 2017 agenda: "The war on information".

Bilderberg is going to tackle fake news. An organisation that has spent 60 years spreading half-truths and disinformation about itself, that has fought tooth and nail to keep information about itself away from the press and public, is suddenly all anxious about protecting the truth? Right.

To be quite honest, it's odd writing about the Bilderberg conference at all at a time when the mainstream press is positively seething with elaborate Russian conspiracy theories. Vladimir Putin has morphed into the grand puppetmaster ­ the arch controller, pulling the strings of the world, holding sway over elections. Forget Bilderberg, the dots have finally been joined and the real hidden hand behind world events has been revealed.

For 60 years, Bilderberg has just been spinning its wheels in the mud. All those billionaire financiers and hedge fund bosses, all those CEOs of giant industrial conglomerates, they've been courting politicians for no reason whatsoever. It's Russia that holds all the strings. If only they'd known! They could have saved a fortune on buffet bills.

Charlie Skelton will be tweeting from Chantilly, Virginia on @deyook.

Bilderberg 2017: secret meeting of global leaders could prove a problem for Trumphttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/01/bilderberg-trump-administration-secret-meeting
The annual gathering of government and industry elites will include a ‘progress report’ on the Trump administration. Will it get a passing grade?
Several members of Donald Trump’s administration are head
Several members of Donald Trump’s administration are headed to the Bilderberg conference, which will include a ‘progress report’ on the White House. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The storm around Donald Trump is about to shift a few miles west of the White House, to a conference centre in Chantilly, Virginia, where the embattled president will be getting his end-of-term grades from the people whose opinion really matters: Bilderberg.

The secretive three-day summit of the political and economic elite kicks off on Thursday in heavily guarded seclusion at the Westfields Marriot, a luxury hotel a short distance from the Oval Office. The hotel was already on lockdown on Wednesday, and an army of landscapers have been busy planting fir trees around the perimeter, to try protect coy billionaires and bashful bank bosses from any prying lenses.
The Westfields Marriott in Chantilly, Virginia, where the 2017
Perched ominously at the top of the conference agenda this year are these words: “The Trump Administration: A progress report”. Is the president going to be put in detention for tweeting in class? Held back a year? Or told to empty his locker and leave? If ever there’s a place where a president could hear the words “you’re fired!”, it’s Bilderberg.

The White House is taking no chances, sending along some big hitters from Team Trump to defend their boss: the national security adviser, HR McMaster; the commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross; and Trump’s new strategist, Chris Liddell. Could the president himself show up to receive his report card in person?

Henry Kissinger, the gravel-throated kingpin of Bilderberg, visited the White House a few weeks ago to discuss “Russia and other things”, and certainly, the Bilderberg conference would be the perfect opportunity for the most powerful man in the world to discuss important global issues with Trump.

The US president’s extraordinary chiding of Nato leaders in Brussels is sure to be chewed over at Bilderberg, which takes its name from the hotel in the Netherlands where its conference first met in 1954. The Bilderbergers have summoned the head of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, to give feedback. Stoltenberg will leading the snappily titled session on “The Trans-Atlantic defence alliance: bullets, bytes and bucks”. He’ll be joined by the Dutch minister of defence and a clutch of senior European politicians and party leaders, all hoping to reset the traumatised transatlantic relationship after Trump’s galumphing visit.

The invitation list for this year’s conference is a veritable covfefe of big-hitters from geopolitics, from the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, to the king of Holland, but perhaps the most significant name on the list is Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the US.

According to the meeting’s agenda, “China” will be discussed at a summit attended by the Chinese ambassador, the US commerce secretary, the US national security adviser, two US senators, the governor of Virginia, two former CIA chiefs – and any number of giant US investors in the country, including the heads of the financial services firms the Carlyle Group and KKR. Oh, and the boss of Google.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s holding company, has just come back from a trip to Beijing, where he was overseeing Google AI’s latest game of Go against puny humans. He declared it “a pleasure to be back in China, a country that I admire a great deal”. It’s possible three days spent chatting to the Chinese ambassador could even be good for business.

All this is the kind of thing that should be headline news, but with the president of Turner International attending, we can be fairly sure Bilderberg won’t make many ripples at CNN. And British readers should not expect much coverage at the London Evening Standard either: their new editor and longtime Bilderberg attendee George Osborne is on the list, despite a general election looming in a week’s time.

You could of course complain about a lack of press coverage of Bilderberg in the UK, but with the head of the media watchdog Ofcom at the conference, you may not get an immediate reply.

While President Trump seems to have sorted out his problems of interior authority - more or less - the conflict has now moved on to concern NATO. Washington is currently speaking against the manipulation of terrorism, while London has no intention of giving up such a useful tool for the extension of its influence. The Bilderberg Group, initially organised as a sounding board for the Alliance, has just been the stage for a difficult debate between the partisans and the adversaries of imperialism in the Middle East.
Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 6 June 2017

There exist no photographs of the meeting of the Bilderberg Group, whose work is confidential. Security for the meeting is not handled by the FBI, nor the Virginia police force, but by a private militia organised by NATO.

The Bilderberg Group was created in 1954 by the CIA and MI6 in order to support the Atlantic Alliance. It was intended to gather personalities from the economic and media sectors with political and military leaders in order to sensitize civil society to the « Red peril ». Far from being a place for decision-making, this very exclusive club has historically been a forum where the elders had to juggle with their fidelity to London and Washington, and the younger members were expected to show that they could be trusted with the opposition to the Soviets [1].

It was during the annual reunion of 1979 that Bernard Lewis revealed to those present the rôle of the Muslim Brotherhood in the resistance to the Afghani Communist government. This Israëli-British-US Islamologist then proposed that the « War for Freedom » (sic) should be extended to all of Central Asia.

It was in 2008, in other words two and a half years in advance, that Basma Kodmani (future spokewoman for the Syrian opposition) and Volker Perthes (future advisor to Jeffrey Feltman for the total and unconditional capitulation of Syria [2]) explained the interest of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in order to dominate the Middle East. They stressed the « moderation » of the Brotherhood faced with the West, and the contrast offered by the « extremist sovereignty » of Iran and Syria [3].

And it was in 2013 that the chairman of the German executive board, Ulrich Grillo, made a case for the organisation of a massive migration of 800,000 Syrian workers to German factories [4].
Bilderberg 2017

The Bilderberg Group has just held its 2017 meeting, from 1 to 4 June, in the United States. Contrary to habit, the 130 participants were not all defending the same project. Quite the opposite - following the speeches by Donald Trump at the Arabo-Islamic-US summit, and at NATO [5], the CIA and MI6 organised a first-day debate which opposed those who are partisans of the fight against Islamism and those who support it. The point was, obviously enough, either to find a compromise between the two camps, or to acknowledge the dissension without allowing it to destroy the initial objective of the Alliance – the fight against Russia [6].

On the anti-Islamism side (that is opposed not to the Muslim religion, but to political Islam as formulated by Sayyid Qutb), we noted the presence of General H. R. McMaster (President Trump’s National Security Advisor) and his expert Nadia Schadlow. McMaster is a recognised strategist whose theories have been verified on the battle-field. Above all, Schadlow has worked on the ways of transforming military victories into political successes. She is particularly interested in the restructuration of poltical movements in conquered countries. She should soon be publishing a new book about the struggle against Islamic radicalism.

On the pro-Islamism side, we note the presence, for the United States, of John Brennan (ex-Director of the CIA) and his ex-subordinates Avril Haines and David Cohen (financing of terrorism). For the United Kingdom, Sir John Sawers (ex-Director of MI6 and a long-time protector of the Brotherhood) and General Nicholas Houghton (ex-Chief of Staff, who prepared the land invasion of Syria). For France, General Benoît Puga (ex-Chief of Staff for the Elysée and commander of the Special Forces in Syria) and Bruno Tertrais (neo-conservative strategist for the Ministry of Defence). Finally, for the private sector, Henry Kravis (Director of the investment fund KKR, and unofficial treasurer for Daesh) and General David Petraeus (co-founder of Daesh).

And if this imbalance were not enough, the organisers had planned for the presence of experts capable of justifying the unjustifiable, like Professor Niell Fergusson (historian of British colonialism).
The possible reversal of alliances

It will take a little time before we know what was said during this meeting, and to understand the conclusions that were reached by the various attendees. However, we already know that London is pushing for a change of paradigm in the Middlde East. If the model of the « Arab Spring » (reproduction of the « Arab Revolt of 1916 » organised by Lawrence of Arabia in order to replace the Ottoman Empire by the British Empire) is abandoned, MI6 hopes to create a new agreement on the basis of political Islamism.

As a result, while Washington has renewed its alliance with Saudi Arabia, and has convinced it to break with the Brotherhood in exchange for 110 billion dollars worth of armament [7], London is pushing for an agreement between Iran, Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood. If this project were to be realised, we would experience the abandon of the Sunni/Chiite conflict and the creation of a « croissant of political Islam » encompassing Teheran, Doha, Ankara, Idleb, Beyrouth and Gaza. This new distribution would enable the United Kingdom to maintain its influence in the region.

The only thing upon which the Allies seem to agree is the necessity of abandoning the principle of a jihadist state. Everyone admits that the devil has to be put back in his box. Which means getting rid of Daesh, even if some people keep working with Al-Qaïda. This is why, worried about its survival, the self-proclaimed Caliph has secretly transmitted an ultimatum to Downing Street and the Elysée.
Choosing sides

We shall see within the next few months if Saudi Arabia’s about-face is genuine. It would be good news for the Syrians, but bad news for the Yemenites (whom the Western world would then ignore). It would offer King Salman the possibility of stimulating the evolution of Wahhabism from a fanatical cult to a normal religion. Already, the sudden conflict which opposes Riyadh to Doha on the question of Iran is doubled by an argument about the possible kinship between the founder of the cult, Mohammed ben Abdelwahhab, and the Qatari Al-Thani dynasty – a claim which has enraged the Saudi’s.

The project of « political Islam » consists of uniting the Muslim Brotherhood and the Khomeinists. It would mean that Iran, and even Hezbollah, would have to substitute this problem for the fight against anti-imperialism. If this were come to pass, it would most certainly lead to the withdrawal of Iran from Syria. The White House is taking this very seriously and is frantically preparing for it. In his speech in Riyadh, Donald Trump already designated Teheran as his new enemy, and has just nominated Michaël D’Andrea (who organised the assassination of Imad Mougniyeh in Damascus in 2008) as the representative for the Iranian section of the CIA [8].

Russia had already prepared for a potential new deal in the Middle East. Consequently, by supporting Syria, it pursued its ambition of gaining access to « warm waters », and by seeking rapprochement with its hereditary adversary, Turkey, of being able to navigate freely via the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus (indispensible for entering the Mediterranean). However, in the long term, political Islam could only cause it problems in the Caucasus.

As always when the players sort their cards, they all have to define their positions. The United Kingdom defends its Empire, France defends its ruling class, and the United States defends its people. In the Middle East, some people will fight for their community, others for their ideas. But things are not always so simple. Thus, Iran might follow the ideal of Imam Khomeiny, confusing the end and the means. What was in the beginning an anti-imperialist revolution led by the power of Islam could evolve into a simple affirmation of the political use of this religion.
The consequences for the rest of the world

MI6 and the CIA took a huge risk by inviting a non-Atlantist to the meeting of Bilderberg 2017. The Chinese ambassador, Cui Tiankai, who was scheduled to speak only on the fourth day of the seminar, was thus able to evaluate the positions of each member of NATO as from the first day.

On one hand, Beijing is counting on the collaboration of Donald Trump, the opening to the United States of its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and the development of all its commercial routes. On the other, it is hoping that the Brexit will lead to an economic and financial alliance with London [9].

Ambassador Cui, who was the Director of the Centre of Political Research for the Chinese Ministry for Foreign Affairs, might possibly be satisfied with the simple destruction of Daesh. But he is not unaware that the people who organised the Caliphate in order to cut the « Silk Road » in Iraq and Syria, and then the war in Ukraine in order to cut the « new Silk Road », are preparing, preventatively, to open a third front in the Philippines and a fourth in Venezuela in order to cut off other communiction projects.

From this point of view, China, which, like Russia, has an interest in supporting Donald Trump, if only to prevent terrorism in its own country, will be asking itself about the possible long-term consequences of British hegemony in the « croissant of political Islam ».
Thierry Meyssan

The 65th Bilderberg Meeting, held earlier this month, from 1-4 June at Marriott Hotel in Chantilly, Virgina, was noteworthy on a number of counts, starting with the presence of four members of the Trump Administration at a gathering where it was widely assumed that both the policy direction and legitimacy of Trump’s presidency would have been hotly contested. This represented a deviation from the poor attendance by senior US officials at Bilderberg during Obama’s second term – during the previous four Bilderberg meetings the Obama Administration sent just one official in 2015. For a number of alternative news outlets, particularly Alex Jones’ Infowars, the presence of the four Trump Administration officials presented a unique ideological challenge given their previous incantations against Bilderberg as a hot-bed of intrigue by the elitist supporters of globalism, and their strong support of Trump, whom they had exalted as the globalist giant-slayer. The Infowars solution to this dilemma was to hold a poorly attended pro-Trump rally outside the Marriott.

While the overall turnout from the anti-Bilderberg protestors at Chantilly was, as Intellihub noted “substantially lower than in 2012 when the Bilderbergers last met at the very same hotel”, the alternative media and key activists were still well represented. In addition to the Infowars crew of David Knight and Owen Shroyer (incredibly, despite the convenience of the US location, Alex Jones failed to turn up with his bullhorn) there was Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change, Dan Dicks from Press For Truth, Jeff Berwick from The Dollar Vigilante, Mark Anderson of the American Free Press, Loose Change producer Jason Bermas (who got into an argument with Jack Posobiec over Trump’s relationship with Bilderberg), Leigh Stewy from Independent Citizen News, Conspiracy Cabbie TV, Lulz Machine, and Chris Dorsey the self-styled “commander” of the Virginia Militia.

Less amusing was the near complete absence of mainstream media to cover the event. Aside from Charlie Skelton from The Guardian, who filed four reports, only James Tennent from the International Business Times briefly flitted through to file one report that claimed Chantilly remained a “sleepy town”, despite the secretive meeting down the road. Even the local media seemed disinterested, with neither the Fairfax County Times nor the Chantilly Connection, bothering to report on the conclave:

Of course the Financial Times (UK), Wall Street Journal (US), Bloomberg (US), The Economist (UK), The Evening Standard (UK), Cook Political Report (US), La Stampa (Italy), Kathimerini Newspaper (Greece) and Dagens Næringsliv (Norway), were all represented at the meeting, but not outside, leaving it to the alternative media to cover the event and thus drive the narrative about Bilderberg. The results, though, were problematic not least because of the persistent repetition of various myths about Bilderberg, mainly by Infowars, that served to mislead rather than inform the public about media treatment of the annual gathering. There a couple of Bilderberg myths in particular that warrant correction.
Not the “Record” You Were Looking For

Among the claims made, perhaps the most astounding was Kit Daniels assertion in Infowars (Jun. 4, 2017), that news coverage of Bilderberg had “hit record highs as the establishment media is forced to admit the true nature of the globalist gathering.” The sub-heading of his article even implied a link to Trump’s ascendency: “Bilderberg more exposed than ever as Trump nationalism rises!” But Daniels claims were odd and contradictory. On the one hand, to support his bold claim, Daniels noted that various mainstream media outlets, specifically the BBC, Sky News and the Guardian were “openly discussing the meeting in Chantilly, Virginia…” Presumably to support his argument Daniels reproduced without comment a screenshot of a Google News search which showed 214,000 results for Bilderberg (Figure 1). But on the other hand, seeming to contradict this claim, Daniels acknowledged that in the US there had been a “mainstream media blackout” on the Bilderberg meeting.

One might well ask how media coverage of Bilderberg can both be hitting “record highs” at the same time as a “mainstream media blackout” seems to be in force in US. Daniels suggests this US media blackout is because “many American media owners are connected to the [Bilderberg] group.” This is an interesting and provocative claim but he makes no attempt to substantiate it. It also fails to explain why in 2015 the Austrian newspaper Der Standard published a number of articles on Bilderberg despite its editor and publisher Oscar Bronner being a long-time participant. Or why in the same year outgoing Steering Committee member and Chairman of Portuguese media conglomerate Impresa SGPS, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, would allow one of Impresa’s publications to run an article quoting approvingly the views of anti-Bilderberg activist Daniel Estulin.

Then there is the curious matter of the avidly pro-Trump media outlet Breitbart. None of its part-owners, the Mercer family, Susie Breitbart or Breitbart CEO Larry Solov, are Bilderberg participants. Last year Breitbart published at least four critical articles on Bilderberg’s Dresden meeting, but this year, despite the convenient US location there was nothing. Breitbart had joined the “mainstream media blackout.” Why?

More problematic is that, other than the Google News screenshot, Daniels provides absolutely no evidence that news coverage of Bilderberg has hit “record highs”. Moreover, the Google News screenshot tells us little as it is just an aggregate figure of all the times Bilderberg is mentioned. Daniels made no attempt to compare this year’s coverage with last year’s or even to show trends over a longer timeframe.

Performing such a search, however, suggests that media coverage for this year’s Bilderberg meeting was actually less than last year’s. A Google News search covering the period of the 2017 Bilderberg meeting brings up 1,130 results (Figure 2), compared to 1,510 results for the 2016 meeting (Figure 3).

If there ever was a “record high” for media reporting on the Bilderberg meeting, that moment has passed as it was surely achieved for the 2013 meeting in Watford, Hertfordshire in Britain with some 14,900 reports according to Google News (Figure 4).

Indeed, a search on the Dow Jones Factiva database (Figure 5) suggests that after spiking in 2013 for the Watford meeting, overall media interest in the annual meeting has trailed off significantly.

Figure 5: Up, Then Down – Trends in Media Reporting on Bilderberg

This also seemed to coincide with a more widespread collapse in interest in the annual conclave, again after peaking as the subject of Google News searches in 2013. A search on Google Trends suggests that Watford again marked a key point with public interest peaking before falling off dramatically (Figure 6). The continuing decline in interest also appears to coincide with the falling numbers of anti-Bilderberg protestors, compare the 2000 protestors at Watford with the few dozen at best, protesting at Chantilly this year.

Emacs!

Figure 6: Declining Interest in Bilderberg? – Source: Google Trends

In short, without proper context, i.e. comparing media coverage of Bilderberg over time, Daniel’s claims about “record highs” are both inaccurate and misleading. Mainstream media coverage of Bilderberg may well be higher than it was 10 to 20 years ago, but the evidence shows that it peaked in 2013, and since then has fallen off steeply, coinciding with the significant drop in public interest. The “mainstream media blackout” that Daniels complained about, with few if any significant US media outlets even mentioning this year’s Bilderberg meeting, should have been an important indicator that his claim was wrong and that, at least in terms of media exposure, the tide has once again turned in Bilderberg’s favour.
‘There is no Bilderberg Group’

Another claim made by quite a few alt-media journalists and analysts during the Chantilly meeting, often with almost identical wording, is that the very existence of Bilderberg had been “denied” up until very recently by the mainstream media. Kit Daniels, for instance, declared in Infowars: “Remember, it was only a few years ago that the mainstream media denied Bilderberg even existed.” Infowars rather earnest correspondent, Owen Shroyer, dispatched to the wilds of Virginia, boldly asserted this as undisputed fact numerous times whilst questioning unsuspecting members of the public at the Herndon Festival:
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“Until about five years ago they denied it. They said [Bilderberg] didn’t exist. Now they have to admit it because of the media coverage…Remember they used to deny it even existed. They used to say it didn’t exist.” (Locals Clueless, Then Terrified of Bilderberg, 1.15- 1.16)

“But that was during the first fifty meetings that [Bilderberg] ‘didn’t exist’ according to the New York Times.” (Trendy Scared Speechless Over Bilderberg, 1.36).

“They used to deny [Bilderberg] went on. Now they have to admit it.” (Awake Local Warns: Bilderberg Will End USA Forever, 1.24).

New York radio talk-back host and legal analyst Lionel Nation also proposed this view in a lengthy podcast at the start of this year’s meeting:
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The first group was very secret. They didn’t want anybody to know this. It was a secret. The Bilderberg Group was a secret. They denied it. They denied it for years [emphasis added]

He made the same point on Russia Today, claiming that for decades the Bilderbergers would clear out resorts to host their annual meetings, bringing in their own security:
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When they were asked, “What are you doing?” They would say, “We don’t know what you are talking about. You are a conspiracy nut. There is no Bilderberg Group.” Then one year they said, “There is”, and now they have Bilderbergmeetings.org online (2.31).

This claim that Bilderberg has connived with the media plot to deny its existence has a very long pedigree, almost as old as Bilderberg itself. Sixty years ago syndicated US columnist Westbrook Pegler suggested something “very mysterious” was afoot if “67 self-qualified, polyglot designers and arbiters of the economic and political fate of the western world” could go into a “secret huddle” on St Simon’s Island, but “not a word gets into the popular press beyond a little routine Associated Press story which completely muffled the importance of the occasion.” Pegler also accused two Bilderberg participants, Ralph McGill, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times of suppressing news of the meeting, (The Spokesman Review, Apr. 10, 1957).

Gary Allen and Larry Abraham, co-authors of the million-selling None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), a major anti-New World Order work of the 1970s, also took issue with media treatment of Bilderberg:
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One would assume…that when the world’s leading parliamentarians and international tycoons meet to discuss the planning of their various nations’ foreign policies, that the news hawks from papers and televisionland would be screaming to high heaven that such an event held in secret makes a mockery of the democratic process…But, of course, the landscape painters merely brush the Bilderbergers right out of existence… (pp.95-96)[emphasis added].

The late Jim Tucker, the main Bilderberg correspondent for the Liberty Lobby’s Spotlight newspaper and its successor, American Free Press, once claimed that:
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High officials of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Times and all three major networks have attended Bilderberg many times, on the promise of secrecy, to report nothing and to not use the world “Bilderberg.” Except for some minor, inconsequential accidents in which the word “Bilderberg” has suddenly appeared in print…the promise has been kept (Bilderberg Diary, p.7) [emphasis added].

Tucker cited just two instances where “Bilderberg” had appeared in the New York Times, and four times it had been inadvertently mentioned in the Washington Post (ibid, p.7).

These original claims of media suppression have evolved into the pervasive myth that mainstream media reporting about Bilderberg is both very recent and was in response to counter-pressure from the alternative media. For example, in 2013 the Guardian’s Charlie Skelton, noting the huge crowds gathered at the Watford meeting and having been shown reports in the Portuguese press declared: “Finally, after 59 years, Bilderberg has beeped its way onto the radar of the mainstream press.” More recently the John Birch Society’s The New American (Jun 14, 2015) claimed the surge in mainstream media reporting about Bilderberg was “following decades of complete silence.” Author Mark Dice, in his book The Bilderberg Group: Facts and Fiction (2015), writes that “for over half a century there wasn’t more than a peep about the meeting in the American mainstream media” (p.1) due to an “arrangement” with the Bilderberg “to keep them out of the news” (p.5). This arrangement was only overturned recently when the alternative media “finally forced some major mainstream media outlets to admit that Bilderberg is real…” (p.3).

This has emerged as the key Bilderberg myth, but none of these statements are true.

Contrary to Daniels’ blanket assertion that until very recently the media had “denied Bilderberg even existed” – an incendiary claim that he, Shroyer, Nation and Brewer fail to back up with any evidence – the mainstream press had actually covered its existence since its very first meeting. For example, we find on the first day of that very first meeting of a still unnamed group at the Bilderberg Hotel in Oostebeek, the Netherlands, the London Times (May 29, 1954) carried this one line report under the heading “Telegrams in Brief”:

On that same day the Guardian newspaper ran a four paragraph Reuters report which also provided some more detail on the first conference, citing a statement from the meeting’s first Chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands:

At the conclusion of the first conference, the New York Times (Jun. 2, 1954) ran two short pieces, one giving a brief run down on who went and the nations represented, while the other reviewed the outcomes of the meeting and Prince Bernhard’s views on its success. The Guardian (Jun. 2, 1954) also ran a longer report from its unnamed “Political Correspondent” which referred to how the “mystery” of the Oostebeek meeting was lifted with the publication of a “ten-page statement” from the organizers (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Reporting on the first Bilderberg Meeting – New York Times (L) and The Guardian (R)

This was only the first meeting. What is also interesting, and again contrary to the claims of most of the aforementioned conspiracy researchers/activists, is that when Prince Bernhard’s meeting eventually obtained its Bilderberg name in 1957, this was reported in a number of outlets. These included the United Press (The Evening Times, (Pennsylvania) Feb. 12, 1957) and the New York Times (Feb. 16, 1957) ahead of the Bilderberg meeting on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia; and by the Times (Oct. 7, 1957) and the Sunday Times (Oct. 6, 1957), in their reports on the Bilderberg meeting in Fiuggi, Italy (Figure . This appears to be first time the term “Bilderberg group” appears in the press. It would not be the last.

Figure 8: ‘They said it didn’t exist’ – Media reports from 1957 on the Bilderberg Group – Clockwise from bottom left, The Times, The Evening Times (Pennsylvania), New York Times, & the Sunday Times.

To be sure, media coverage of Bilderberg did change, as Prince Bernhard and Bilderberg co-founder Joseph Retinger’s views on how the annual meeting should work moved away from directly inserting its ideas into public discussion through post-meeting communiques or statements, towards using its members to disseminate its ideas into the public sphere. But a review of the media over the 63 years since the first Bilderberg meeting fails to sustain the claims that there was an active campaign to suppress news of its existence.

The following table (Figure 9) tracks media reporting either directly citing the “Bilderberg Group” or covering its meetings before it acquired that name for the period from 1950 through to 2009 just before the Bilderberg Meetings website appeared in 2010. It also includes profiles or obituaries of its members that specifically mention their Bilderberg role. This graph samples only four publications: three British newspapers, the Times/Sunday Times, the Daily/Sunday Telegraph, and the Financial Times; and the leading US paper, the New York Times. A more comprehensive survey of the US and European media will no doubt yield more hits. But this small sample alone is arguably sufficient to refute the baseless claims of Daniels, Shroyer, Nation, Brewer and others that the mainstream media had “denied” for “years” or “decades” the very existence of Bilderberg.

Figure 9: Survey of Mainstream Media reports mentioning the Bilderberg Group (1950-2009)
Sources: New York Times Archive; Financial Times Historical Archive; The Times Historical Archive; The Sunday Times Historical Archive; and The Telegraph Historical Archive.

The record of mainstream media reporting on Bilderberg is not without its faults. There appears to be no media reporting in the English-speaking press at least, about the Bilderberg meetings in 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1961, and coverage dropped off in the 1980s and 1990s. The New York Times, for example, published just two articles in the 1980s mentioning Bilderberg. And of course there remains a problem of whether that reporting bothered to really delve into Bilderberg; much of it did not, but Bilderberg’s existence was not denied.

Proponents of “they used to deny [Bilderberg] went on”, also have to contend with the plethora of voluntary public statements and memoirs from members of the Bilderberg Steering Committee and other participants, acknowledging both Bilderberg’s existence and their own role in it. In 1959, for example, Bilderberg’s chairman, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, mentioned Bilderberg in his article “Minds Across the Atlantic” in Delta: A Review of Arts, Life and Thought in the Netherlands, a journal published by the Netherlands Institute for International Cultural Relations. Prince Bernhard wrote about how he had formed a “group of persons” with “outstanding qualities” for the purpose of promoting “mutual rapprochement” between America and Europe. He continued:
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This group has come to be known as the Bilderberg Group, the name being derived from the Dutch hotel where they came together for the first time and where they have often met since. Some odd people detect a sinister conspiracy in all this, but the true facts would disappoint them (Delta, September 1959, p.24; emphasis added).

There were whole chapters devoted to Bilderberg in Alden Hatch’s 1962 authorized biography of Prince Bernhard (H.R.H. Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands) and in John Pomian’s 1972 biography of Bilderberg co-founder Retinger (Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise). In the first volume of his memoirs, The White House Years (1979), former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger mentions attending the 1971 Bilderberg meeting at Woodstock. George W. Ball, an Undersecretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations and Steering Committee member, addressed his Bilderberg experiences in his memoir, The Past Has Another Pattern (1983). British politician Denis Healey, a one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer, devoted a lengthy chapter to his Bilderberg history in his autobiography, The Time of My Life (1989). Former media mogul and convicted felon Conrad Black, a former Steering Committee member, briefly discusses his Bilderberg participation in both volumes of his memoirs – A Life in Progress (1993) and A Matter of Principle (2012).

And of course the late plutocrat, and one of the original Bilderberg members, David Rockefeller, wrote about glowingly about the virtues of Bilderberg in his Memoirs (2002):
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…Bilderberg is an intensely interesting annual discussion group that debates issues of significance to both Europeans and North Americans—without reaching a consensus (p.411).

Rockefeller also intimated that Bilderberg, living up to its original transatlantic purpose, had helped to resolve the tensions between Europe and America by performing the shaping and influencing role envisaged by Retinger:
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If these fissures had not been addressed, the consequences for the Atlantic Alliance might have been disastrous. While it is not Bilderberg’s role to resolve disputes among sovereign states, individual participants are free to report on what they have heard to those who do wield official power in their respective countries (p.412; emphasis added).